This Is Not a Skyscraper, Kostos Dean

This Is Not a Skyscraper examines New York City through a surrealist lens. Like the title of Magrittes painting, This is not a pipe, these poems question perceptions of the metropolis. While NYC entices talents that swarm its stages, museums, runways, and readings, throngs of outsiders live on the citys margins, silenced. Among the grotesqueries of corruption, an African immigrant is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. His disembodied voice introduces the book. Many of these poems attempt to speak for the others existing on the peripheral, whose perspectives have been abandoned.